Canada leaves Aboriginal hopes to incubate in misery

When will Canadians, led by the country’s one million aboriginal people, face the inescapable? Reserves are incubators of misery. The entire moribund, ramshackle edifice supported by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development needs to be demolished. It is rotten at its core.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whom you might expect would be ideologically predisposed to scrapping the 1876 Indian Act – an explicitly racist tract whose continued existence in our law is a national disgrace – has until now been unwilling to go there. A year ago, at the last aboriginal conference in Ottawa, Harper steered clear of scrapping the Act outright, instead lauding “practical, incremental and real change.”

Yet incremental change, we have seen, barely makes a dent – if it makes it past the gate at all.

It’s not just the tweaks to land-lease management on reserves contained in Bill C-45, which in part ignited the “Idle no More” protests. There have been many attempts at piecemeal repair. In 1996 there was Bill C-79, the Indian Act Optional Modification Act; it died on the order paper. In 2002 there was Bill C-7, the First Nations Governance Act, which attempted to reform reserve administration across the board. It perished in 2003. In 2008 there was Bill C-47, the Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, to redress inequity in the treatment of women. That one died on the order paper three times. It is before Parliament again as Bill S-2.

Amid these and other efforts, conditions on reserves have worsened. In its 2011 status report, the office of the Auditor-General chronicles, in customarily neutral tones, a horror show of civil neglect. On reserves, the high school graduation rate is 41 per cent, compared with a national average near 80 per cent. There’s a worsening housing shortage and huge numbers of the houses that do exist are mould-ridden. Children on reserves are eight times likelier than the national average to be in the care of child and family services.

This is not the upshot of one audit, mind you, but many. There were seven, between 2002 and 2008, chronicling the same problems.

At root, the malaise is economic. Except where there is a nearby resource development, or an enterprise such as a casino, these are communities with no natural economies, served by a remote federal bureaucracy (rather than a conventional municipal or provincial one), in which neither individuals nor the bands themselves hold title to their lands or homes.

The lack of property rights is not incidental. It is fundamental. It prevents the securing of mortgages, the building of equity and the accumulation of wealth. In effect the reserve system incentivizes misery, paying people to live where they cannot work. This is why all sides in this equation, including reserve residents and the taxpayer who bears the cost of Aboriginal Affairs’ $7.4-billion annual budget, feel so viscerally that they are being cheated. They are.

No fundamental change in governance can or should happen without the consent of the governed. So step one – and the most important immediate goal of the Idle No More movement, I would argue – should be the planning of a new Aboriginal Peoples’ Congress, national in scope, with representation from all 600-plus bands as well as off-reserve indigenous peoples, and the population at large.

At that confab, which might last a month or more, all sides would have their say on a lasting way forward. And the bright lights in the aboriginal movement, such as property-rights advocate and B.C. chief Manny Jules, could make the case, as well as it can be made, for a fundamental break with the past.

To me, in a nutshell, that break looks like this: Give title to the land and the homes to the people who live in them and allow them to manage their property – buy, sell or hold – as they see fit. In areas where there is no natural economy or prospect of creating one, help people start over somewhere else. Such a change might be grandfathered over 25 years, to ease the economic impact on the most disadvantaged.

At the same time, deal decisively and fairly with the backlog of outstanding land claims, numbering at more than 700 – estimated cost, anywhere from $6-billion to $15-billion, at the upper margin. That would require a major effort on the part of the government: It would need to make the case for Canadians collectively taking a one-time only write-down, for the sake of – yes it sounds quaint, doesn’t it, in 2013? – a just society.

That is a tall order, clearly. Perhaps it is impossible. Perhaps it is impractical. No doubt it would be inconvenient and costly. Perhaps there is a better way.

But with the country facing the prospect of prolonged protest, if not Oka-style insurrection, can we avoid discussing it any longer? Idle No More, it seems to me, is a legitimate and not unsurprising response to systemic misery. It should not be about patching up the unfixable.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.